Study: Both Public, Police View Black Kids As Older, Less Innocent Than Whites

According to research published by the American Psychological Association, Black boys as young as 10 are proven to not be given the same presumption of childhood innocence as their White peers. Instead, they’re considered to be much older than what they are, perceived to be guilty, and face police violence if accused of a crime.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, sought to examine the extent to which the racial bias exists and how significant the consequences are. Speaking on the report, Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, explained, “Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics, such as innocence and the need for protection. Our research found that Black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when White boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”

More from News One.

European Social Statistics: 2013 edition

The pocketbook European Social Statistics provides a comparative overview of the social statistics available in Europe. The most recent data are presented here showing the situation in the 27 Member States and at the European and Euro area levels (EU-27 and EA-17 aggregates) where relevant as well as in EFTA (including Iceland, which is also a candidate country) and candidate countries when available (Montenegro, Croatia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey). This pocketbook, intended for both generalists and specialists, is divided into seven parts.

Each of the seven chapters focuses on an area of social conditions. Within each chapter, a range of policy-relevant indicators, as well as more descriptive data, are presented in tables and graphs and accompanied by a short commentary.

Direct link to PDF document from Eurostat.

Firearms Reported Lost and Stolen

From the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

The report gives an overview, for calendar year 2012, of the lost and stolen gun file entries in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), and of the lost and stolen firearm reports submitted by Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) to ATF. This report will be updated and published annually.
Lost and stolen firearms pose a substantial threat to public safety and to law enforcement. Those that steal firearms commit violent crimes with stolen guns, transfer stolen firearms to others who commit crimes, and create an unregulated secondary market for firearms, including a market for those who are prohibited by law from possessing a gun. Moreover, thieves and illicit traffickers often obliterate the serial numbers of stolen firearms so that if a stolen firearm is later recovered by law enforcement, it cannot identified as stolen or traced to the original purchaser. Lost firearms pose a similar threat. Like stolen firearms, they are most often bought and sold in an unregulated secondary market where law enforcement is unable to trace transactions. As a result, when a lost or stolen gun is later recovered from a crime scene, tracing (which only identifies the original manufacturer, the licensed dealer who sold the firearm, and the original purchaser) will not provide a direct link to the perpetrator of the crime

Annual Uniform Crime Report, 2011 Preliminary

Preliminary figures indicate that, as a whole, law enforcement agencies throughout the nation reported a decrease of 4.0 percent in the number of violent crimes brought to their attention for 2011 when compared with figures reported for 2010. The violent crime category includes murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Collectively, the number of property crimes in the United States in 2011 decreased 0.8 percent when compared with data from 2010. Property crimes include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson is also a property crime, but data for arson are not included in property crime totals. Figures for 2011 indicate that arson decreased 5.0 percent when compared with 2010 figures.


More from the FBI.

No data on shootings by police

Within the Crime in the United States report from the FBI, one can find police employee data by status (sworn/civilian), among many other statistics.

However, national data on shootings by police is not collected: "The nation's leading law enforcement agency collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.

"'We don't have a mandate to do that,' said William Carr, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C. 'It would take a request from Congress for us to collect that data.'

"Congress, it seems, hasn't asked."

Prison Happy

From the American Consumers Newsletter

Americans are singularly obsessed with imprisonment. No other country puts as many people behind bars. The number of people in custody in the nation's local jails and state or federal prisons more than tripled between 1985 and 2010, growing from 744,208 to 2.3 million, according to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics. The rate of imprisonment more than doubled during the time period, climbing from 313 to 731 incarcerations per 100,000 population.

Comparing International Criminal Justice Systems

"This briefing was prepared for the House of Commons Justice Committee to provide an international dimension to its inquiry into the budget and structure of the Ministry of Justice in England and Wales...

"We selected a range of advanced democratic nations for our detailed work, including some common law and non-common law jurisdictions, countries from the European Union and the Commonwealth, and some with reputations either for liberal or punitive justice systems. To enhance our understanding of the United States of America, for which only limited data are available at the federal level, we also included the state of California within our analyses."

Indicators of School Crime and Safety

National Center for Education Statistics - Bureau of Justice Statistics

Our nation’s schools should be safe havens for teaching and learning, free of crime and violence. Any instance of crime or violence at school not only affects the individuals involved, but also may disrupt the educational process and affect bystanders, the school itself, and the surrounding community.
Establishing good indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the nation and regularly updating and monitoring these indicators is important in ensuring the safety of our nation’s students. This is the aim of Indicators of School Crime and Safety.

Areas With Concentrated Poverty: 2006–2010

People living in poverty tend to be clustered in certain neighborhoods rather than being evenly distributed across geographic areas. Measuring this concentration of poverty is important because researchers have found that living in areas with many other poor people places burdens on low-income families beyond what the families' own individual circumstances would dictate. Many argue that this concentration of poverty results in higher crime rates, underperforming public schools, poor housing and health conditions, as well as limited access to private services

Direct link to full report

Identity Theft Reported by Households, 2005-2010

An estimated 8.6 million households had at least one person age 12 or older who experienced identity theft victimization in 2010, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. This was an increase from the 6.4 million households victimized in 2005.

Identity theft is the unauthorized use or attempted use of an existing credit card or another type of existing account, the unauthorized use of personal information to open a new account or for another fraudulent purpose, or a combination of these.

The unauthorized use of an existing credit card accounted for much of the increase in household identity theft from 2005 to 2010. The number of households experiencing the misuse of an existing credit card rose from about 3.6 million in 2005 to 5.5 million in 2010.

Link to full report.

View the publication web page for additional formats and information

Crime and Arrrest

From the Bureau of Justice Statistics:

Arrest in the United States, 1980-2009 [PDF]
Bureau of Justice Statistics - Criminal Victimization, 2010 [PDF]

FBI Releases Bank Crime Statistics for Second Quarter of 2011

During the second quarter of 2011, there were 1,023 reported violations of the Federal Bank Robbery and Incidental Crimes Statue, a decrease from the 1,146 reported violations in the same quarter of 2010. According to statistics released by the FBI, there were 1,007 robberies, 15 burglaries, one larceny, and two extortions of financial institutions reported between April 1, 2011 and June 30, 2011.

Highlights of the report include:
•Loot was taken in 91 percent of the incidents, totaling more than $7.8 million.
•Of the loot taken, 23 percent of it was recovered. More than $1.8 million was recovered and returned to financial institutions.
•Bank crimes most frequently occurred on Friday. Regardless of the day, the time frame when bank crimes occurred most frequently was between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.

Use of Victim Service Agencies by Victims of Serious Violent Crime

From 1993 to 2009, an average of 9% of victims of serious violent crime—rape or other sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault—received assistance from a victim service agency. Victim service agencies are publicly or privately funded organizations that provide victims with support and services to aid their physical and emotional recovery, offer protection from future victimizations, guide them through the criminal
justice system process, and assist them in obtaining restitution.

More HERE (PDF).

National Corrections Reporting Program, 2009 - Statistical Tables

This update adds data for 2009 to the electronic series of selected tables on most serious offense, sentence length, and time served in state prison. The National Corrections Reporting Program collects demographic information, conviction offenses, sentence length, credited jail time, type of admission, type of release, and time served from individual prisoner records in participating jurisdictions.

State of Sentencing 2010

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia adopted new criminal justice policies—ranging from scaling back mandatory sentencing laws to reforming crack and powder cocaine sentencing disparities to improving parole supervision -- all aimed at reducing prison populations and facilitating successful reentry of ex-offenders, while at the same time, ensuring public safety.

Today, 7.2 million men and women are under correctional supervision. Of this total, five million are monitored in the community on probation or parole and 2.3 million are incarcerated in prisons or jails. As a result the nation maintains the highest rate of incarceration in the world at 743 per 100,000 population.

Comparing DNA Profiling & Databases in the US and England

Many senior U.S. law enforcement officials believe that the English criminal justice system has capitalized more fully on the crime-fighting potential of forensic DNA evidence than the U.S. criminal justice system. They contend that the English system is much faster at testing DNA samples and at uploading the test results into its forensic DNA database and that the English national DNA database provides more database hits that might help law enforcement solve and prevent crimes. Members of the RAND Center on Quality Policing (CQP) asked RAND researchers to explore the forensic DNA analysis systems in England and the United States to find out whether these perceptions are accurate. This report presents CQP's best efforts to undertake this comparative analysis, which was severely hampered by a lack of data on the U.S. and English forensic DNA systems and the unwillingness of some U.S. agencies to share their data.

Victims of Identity Theft, 2008

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics

Presents findings from the 2008 Identity Theft Supplement (ITS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS/ITS used interviews from a nationally representative sample of about 56,500 U.S. household residents to collect the first BJS data on individual victims of identity theft. Identity theft is defined as the unauthorized use or attempted use of existing accounts, the unauthorized use or attempted use of personal information to open a new account, and the misuse or attempted use of personal information for a fraudulent purpose. The report details the number and percentage of persons who reported at least one incident of identity theft over the past two years, the amount of direct and indirect financial loss due to identity theft, victim reporting to credit bureaus and law enforcement agencies, and the impact of identity theft on victims'lives.

•An estimated 11.7 million persons, representing 5% of all persons age 16 or older in the United States, experienced at least one type of identity theft in a 2-year period.
•Although the total financial cost of identity theft was nearly $17.3 billion over a 2-year period, less than a quarter (23%) of identity theft victims suffered an out-of-pocket financial loss from the victimization.
•About 42% of victims spent 1 day or less working to resolve the financial and credit problems associated with the identity theft; however, 3% continued to experience problems related to the theft more than 6 months after discovering it.

Hate Crime Statistics- Compare & visualize the data

From Matthew Kopjak, FindTheBest Press/Media

On April 23, 1990, Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act, which required the Attorney General to collect data ‘about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity’ (U.S. Dept of Justice-FBI). The data visualized in this comparison was gathered from the 2008, FBI statistics on hate crimes and allows users to find and compare information about hate crime statistics.

Anti-Mental vs Anti-White vs Anti- Atheism vs Anti-Male Homosexual provides a side-by-side comparison of various statistics including: Bias, Total Offenses, Murder or Non-negligent Manslaughter, Forcible Rape, Aggravated Assault, Robbery, and more… Simply click Visualize in the top left corner to view graph statistics categorized by crime & bias. Whether you’re looking for information on the most common hate crime group, or statistics related to your race, religion, or sexual orientation, this resource will help you find the answers.

Hate Crime Statistics 2009

Source: The FBI

Of the 6,598 single-bias incidents, 48.5 percent were motivated by a racial bias, 19.7 percent were motivated by a religious bias, 18.5 percent were motivated by a sexual-orientation bias, and 11.8 percent were motivated by an ethnicity/national origin bias. Bias against a disability accounted for 1.5 percent of single-bias incidents.
There were 4,793 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons in 2009. Intimidation accounted for 45.0 percent of crimes against persons, simple assaults for 35.3 percent, and aggravated assaults for 19.1 percent. Other offenses, including nine forcible rapes and eight murders, accounted for the remainder.
There were 2,970 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against property; most of these (83.0 percent) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism.
The remaining 17.0 percent of crimes against property consisted of robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, and other offenses.

An analysis of data for single-bias hate crime incident victims revealed that 48.8 percent were targeted because of the offender’s bias against a race, 18.9 percent because of a bias against a religious belief, 17.8 percent because of a sexual orientation bias, 13.3 percent because of an ethnicity/national origin bias, and 1.2 percent because of a disability bias.
Of the 6,225 known offenders, 62.4 percent were white, 18.5 percent were black, 7.3 percent were groups made up of individuals of various races (multiple races, group), 1.0 percent were American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 0.7 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander. The race was unknown for the remaining known offenders.
The largest percentage (31.3 percent) of hate crime incidents occurred in or near homes. In addition, 17.2 percent took place on highways, roads, alleys, or streets; 11.4 percent happened at schools or colleges; 6.1 percent in parking lots or garages; and 4.3 percent in churches, synagogues, or temples. The remaining 29.7 percent of hate crime incidents took place at other specified locations, multiple locations, or other/unknown locations.

Alcohol and Crime: Data from 2002 to 2008

This webpage includes analyses from four data sources: the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (SISFCF), and the Survey of Inmates in Local Jails (SILJ). Each data source examines the involvement of alcohol and violent crime from different perspectives and different sets of criminal behaviors. In NIBRS law enforcement officers are asked to record whether alcohol use by victims, offenders, or both was involved in the incident. In NCVS victims are asked to report whether they believe the offenders had consumed alcohol prior to or during the crime. Finally, in the inmate surveys prison and jail inmates are asked if they were using alcohol at the time of the crime for which they were incarcerated.